When you run an agent from a prototype to production, something changes. Not the model. Not the framework. The infrastructure requirements split apart.
Last month, LiteLLM's team published how they built an agent to cover 30% of their engineering backlog. The post walks through their infrastructure—brain/sandbox split, credential scoping, harness abstraction—but the deeper lesson is architectural. And it's one that every team shipping agents at scale is going to hit.
Let me explain what the brain/sandbox pattern is, why it matters, and what it teaches about production-grade agent infrastructure.
The Sandbox Boot Problem
Most agent prototypes run monolithically: one container, one agent session, everything in one process.
